so many questions

here's the thing.

i want to know everything.

i want to know which side of the bed you sleep on when it's just you. and how you take your coffee--or your tea--or your oversized glass of orange juice. i want to study how your eyelashes cut the air when you look down and learn the movement of your fingers across the sunday times. i want to count the ways in which you laugh--in which i can make you laugh. i want to know how old you were when you first felt the sting of heartache--were you seven, ten, twenty-one? what was her name? the color of her hair? what was the first lie you told? the last? tell me about the first time you made love--the color of the morning-after as it angled into the room, as it cut across her back. tell me your first great loss. your secret shame--the thing you think makes you damaged in that irreparable way. teach me how to undress you from across a room. how to settle and silence your chaos. teach me to clear a space for you. always. let me love the cracked and dirty and fatally-flawed version of yourself. tell me if you believe in past lives and why. is there an image that feels older than yourself? i want to know what you cook and how you cook it and if you play a record while you do so. i want to know if there is a room in the apartment that is better for dancing than the others. tell me what you get from the corner store night after night. does the man behind the counter know your name?  i want to know if there is a color to your grief. is it a wooly overcoat heavy on your shoulders or a shadow that stands a perpetual ten feet back? i want to know what you're most afraid of--not what you say you're most afraid of, but what is too terrifying to even utter aloud.

i think you think i want too much. that i demand too much. that i...expect too much.

that you'll never be enough to fill the space of all my wants and needs.

and i want to shake you. tell you you were enough for me that first night we met. and you've been enough every day since.

it's not a question of enough or not enough. it's a question of wanting to know more. of wanting to sit with your hand on mine and have that be everything.

image credit unknown

Trading in New York for Boston (just for the weekend).

 

 

skiing at Killington in Vermont. cheering on UVA at Boston College. Tenacious D at House of Blues. late night at Chau Chow City (something to do only once...check it off your Boston bucket list and be done). 80's night dancing at 6B. and a Sunday morning brunch that saw about three or four different seatings.

I am going to need a few days off after this little getaway.

The thing is, every time I visit my brother in Boston...it gets harder to leave. Such a beautiful city, so much charm.

waiting for morning

i used to think i couldn't sleep next to the men i cared about because i was afraid they'd leave.

it took some time to learn that i wasn't so much afraid they'd leave as utterly excited that they would stay, and night would turn to morning, and i'd wake to two coffees and a shared newspaper and a filled silence.

and it was that excitement that kept me from sleep, stretching the night forever in front of me.

so i'd lie there, eyes open, like a child, whispering,

wake up, wake up, i'm ready to play now. 

image by Emma Hartvig

on Body Image--and why I write about it.

It's National Eating Disorders Awareness Week (February 24-March 2). Because of that, there's some great literature on the internet this week, including this piece by Kate Fridkis which I read on Huff Post Women this morning and inspired me to write what follows...

I write about body image because "How can I know what I think until I see what I say."*

I write about body image because I hardly ever feel beautiful, but know that I am.

I write about body image because beauty is an alienating thing--a terribly lonely thing--belonging not to the the person in possession of it, but to all those with the eyes to behold it.

I write about body image because at the age of nineteen, heartbroken and homesick and absolutely out-of-my-depth, I learned what a calorie was.

And I followed a false god home.

I write about body image because it took five minutes in front of a mirror to reshape how I perceived my own body. Not thin, fat.  Fat, now.

I write about body image because the body is flesh and bones and tangible in a way that everything else is not.

I write about body image because it's easier to think a man doesn't like me because-of-what-I-look-like than to hang in the gray space of the-infinite-uknonwn. But why, why doesn't he like me?

And I'm not good at the gray space.

I write about body image because body-image sometimes seems like a life-raft worth clinging to in the choppy waters of this impossible sea we call life.It isn't.

I write about body image because for many, many years when I would feel too much, I would eat too much, just to sleep, a little. And then, to feel nothing, if only for a moment.

I write about body image because some days it is absolutely unbearable to live in my skin. And I think I cannot endure this sensation a moment longer. And I know it has nothing do with my physical body...yet it feels like it does.

I write about body image because for a long time it was easier to hate my thighs and my hips than admit I really did not like myself. I write about body image because it is the prism through which we, as women, see and talk about the world.

We talk about wanting to look this way or that way, when (I'm convinced), what we really want is love and acceptance and life-alteringly-good-things. (And appearance, for the most part, does not alter one's life--not in the big ways we always imagine it might. This, I know from experience).I write about body image because it is the code by which we discuss things so large they scare us to say aloud.

I say I'm fat when what I really mean is I'm sad. And I berate the size of my thighs because that is easier than admitting I am untethered and adrift and totally lost at this point in my life--that notion is too big and too true and will surely make others uncomfortable, so I make it small...so small that it is about the size of my waist and the color of my hair and the awkward arrangement of moles on the left side of my face.

I write about body image because before I can tell you just-why-it-is-I-really-don't-care-for-a-particular-woman (and sometimes, I really don't) I can say no less than five judgmental and evaluative things about what-she-looks-like. (Think about it, I bet you can do this too).I find this both appalling and fascinating.

I write about body image because it shouldn't be a thing, but it is a thing, and more than that.. it points to THE-THINGS!(all the big and significant things that life is really and actually about and therefore difficult to break down into small, manageable pieces).

I write about body image because my eating disorder wasn't about what I looked like, even if for years I thought that it was. And so body image isn't really about what we look like, even if we continue to cling to the notion that it is.

I write about body image because I'm so much better now and so much happier and I still have a nearly impossible time having my photo taken...and what the hell, you know?

 

 

 

 

*E.M. Forster said this. And he's the coolest. 

 

 

i want...

i want art in the bathroom.

fresh flowers on fridays.

i want to light a birthday candle every morning just for that-smell-right-after-it's-been-blown-out.

i want the popped collar.

i want a lifetime of the-hand-on-the-thigh-in-that-way-that-doesn't-usually-survive-marriage.*

i want to be your two am secret. that little intake of air that rocks behind the lips like a horse at the start of a race.

i want the man who after hearing the whole of my story will ask, unprompted, what parts of your body did you hate the most? and then love them all the more.

i want to go to the beach. right now, i want to go. in the middle of this new york winter.

and i want to wear a bathing suit--a small one. just to attract the attention, just to feel those storied and much-talked-about long and withering glances. i want to lose days to the ocean. for the blue of the water to stain me, to wash me, to wrinkle and make a prune of me, and remind me that i'm deliciously human and capable of floating.

i want to make up for lost time.

and i want and i want and i want.

*inspired  by a phrase written by the inestimable anna  quindlen